


A Strike of Lightning

by Kendrick_Harlow



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Because Cas Tried to Adopt them Both, Castiel is Revived, Claire is a Good Bro, Crimes Against Kale, Drama, Family Drama, Fish are Friends - Not Food, Gen, In Moral Context, Jack Doesn't Understand Smiling, Jack and Claire are Unofficial Siblings, Jack is Not Inherently Evil, Jack is confused, Lucifer's Son - Freeform, Moral Dilemmas, Nephilim, Reference to Finding Nemo, Sassy Claire Novak, Son of Satan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-21
Updated: 2017-05-21
Packaged: 2018-11-03 07:30:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10962591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kendrick_Harlow/pseuds/Kendrick_Harlow
Summary: "Jack tried to smile at him without properly understanding how to smile. Surely, there couldn’t be more than one kind of smile? In response, the man’s face morphed into alarm."Jack, newborn nephilim, escapes the nursery in short order, in fear for his life. While investigating what it means to be the half-angel, half-human son of Satan, he finds Claire Novak, a human who carries the echoes of a familiar angel's grace.Then he accidentally becomes a hunter.His life is a joke.





	A Strike of Lightning

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know why, but I'm stuck on "What if Jack isn't the Big Bad?" It's just so...worn out. Also, side note, I love Claire Novac and wish she had more episodes. But that's not why she's in here. She's here for character development reasons.

Jack suspected that his tumultuous confusion was also endless. He knew things, but not how they fit holistically, like gears in a clock, driving each other forward. Now that he thought about it, he’d never even seen gears before, but his mother had, and some of what his mother knew, he knew. Then there were the knowings that were less fact and more feeling. Instinct or emotion? Were they the same thing in the end?

A tall man lumbered into his room, the one that had Jack’s name painted garishly inside it, and one of the knowings whispered, _safety._ Safety in numbers? The man echoed with traces of the grace that had already protected Jack more than once. _Friend?_ Jack tried to smile at him without properly understanding how to smile. Surely, there couldn’t be more than one kind of smile? In response, the man’s face morphed into alarm.

_Danger,_ Jack’s brain began to scream. _Not safety. Leave._

He spread wings he’d never flown on before and burst out of the room. For a split second, he caught a whiff of the grace that had protected him, but it smelled burnt. A body laid on the ground as a second sobbed over it.

The sight inspired sadness, though Jack did not fully comprehend why. Was it because part of his _safety_ was gone? Was it about more than _safe_ and _not safe_? He flew faster, faltering as he went, unsure of how to use these new muscles.

+++

Jack spent the next few days observing humanity from the sidelines. Rule #1, he soon learned, was that people caused a stir if he was not wearing clothes. They noticed him if he did not wear them, but he became invisible the second he donned the appropriate cloth. Like camouflage. Although, there was more to it than he’d originally believed because one could camouflage _wrong._ Jack had decided he liked flowers, they smelled nice, and thought it amusing to discretely select (Rule #2: People yelled when they saw you take things) a garment with their likeness patterned over it. People began to stare again. This was when he learned Rule #3: A large portion of humanity separated between males and females, and each designation had its own set of camouflage regulations. Jack quickly decided that Rule #3 was stupid, but resigned himself to following it for now. After all, how could he perfect a world he did not understand?

On his third day abroad, he stood atop a mountain, his windbreaker flapping around him as lightning split lines through the sky. A bolt hit him, though didn’t cause much bother aside from scorching his clothes. He mended them with a small part of his grace, lest his camouflage cease functioning. As he stared at the sky, he felt as though he could relate to the lightning on a personal level. It was always caught running back and forth between above and below, forever tossed between two worlds, and all the more destructive for it.

He’d learned enough about humans, he thought. He needed to explore the second half of his heritage—the half that made his insides burn as if there was a small sun settled right against his sternum. He let it reach out. The backs of his eyelids lit up with tiny suns like his, and for a moment he contemplated if this was what the stars would have felt like looking at each other across space, had they been sentient. Without hesitation, he took off to the nearest one.

The angel it belonged to tried to take his head off before he could so much as breathe in its presence. Rude. He had to trap her against a wall with his power just to get her to speak to him.

“Why did you try to kill me?” he asked her. “I have done nothing to you.”

The angel growled at him as it squirmed against his hold. Feral. “No, but you will,” she insisted. “You’re _Lucifer’s_ son.”

Jack tilted his head to the side in befuddlement. “And Lucifer was God’s son.”

“What? You think the evil skips a generation?”

“Is evil genetic?” Jack’s question was innocent and sincere. He didn’t know. Was evil like eye color? Because he didn’t get his father’s eye color either. “I am confused.”

“Nephilim have always destroyed things. You will, too, unless we destroy you first.”

“Then I am more confused,” said Jack. “How can you know there are no good nephilim if you kill them all?”

The longer Jack considered it, the less sense it made, just like how the humans camouflaged differently based on a few incongruent body parts. He put the angel to sleep (sleep was the one where their heart kept beating, right?) and disappeared. Angels were not the answer. Perhaps he needed to find someone more similar to him, who carried both a human presence and angelic energy.

+++

It took him two days of searching to realize that it wasn’t possible. All of the nephilim were indeed dead. Instead, he followed a human girl whose blood echoed with the song of angels, despite not being an angel. The grace itself was familiar. _Safe_. _Protector._ She was on the side of the road, a glass bottle smashed at her feet, screaming at a car while she abused its tires. Jack landed a hundred yards away and began to approach with caution, fiddling with the strap of his backpack. (He felt safe in the assumption that no one had wanted it: the bag had been sitting alone at a train station. There had been some kind of box with wires inside, but whatever it was had been defective, because it exploded the minute he’d tried to figure out what it was. Shoddy construction, honestly. Good thing he was sturdy.) The girl only noticed him when he was within human shouting distance. Vehemently, she scrubbed at her eyes.

Jack debated on what to say before settling on a hesitant “Are…you…okay?” People had asked him that a lot, so it was probably the right course of action.

“ _Dandy,_ ” she spat out.

“You don’t look dandy,” he answered in perplexity. She didn’t translate the perplexity.

“Look, what do you want?” she snapped.

Want? He blinked. “World peace?” Maybe. He wasn’t sure yet. Also, it depended on one’s definition of world peace.

“You think you’re funny, don’t you?”

“Not particularly.” He glanced at her car, with the hood still up. “Is your car broken?”

“What gave it away?”

“You’re not driving it.” When she rolled her eyes at him, he tried another path. “I could try to fix it for you?” He wasn’t sure it was within his wheelhouse, but if the nephilim grandson of God couldn’t do it, he wasn’t sure what would. She made a gesture at him as if to say _go ahead,_ then stalked off to the driver’s side door.

When she wasn’t looking, he placed his hand over the engine and thought, _Mend._ A golden haze settled over the incomprehensible mess of machinery. There was a click. “It might work now?”

She turned the keys. The metal beast purred like a kitten. He doubted it would fail on her again any time soon—he’d restored it to brand new. She regarded him with unsure eyes. “Um. Thanks?” Then she glanced up and down the long stretch of empty road, whose only other occupants were some rowdy dust clouds. “Hey, where’d you come from anyway?”

“Washington.” He was pretty sure.

“No, I mean…did you walk all this way?” She seemed very focused on his backpack. “I could give you a ride, since you, you know, _fixed_ my ride.”

Jack didn’t need a ride, but what he did need was an excuse to stay with this girl until he puzzled out why she had traces of angel all over her. “That would be…” What did humans say? “…cool. Thank you.”

She snorted at him. “God, you sound like someone I know. Or used to know anyway.” She glanced at her phone as she said this, her eyes regaining a misty sheen. “Goddamn dust,” she cursed as she rubbed along the upper edge of her cheekbones, where mascara had begun to coalesce into war-paint smudges. “I’m Claire, by the way.”

“I’m Jack.” He was glad she didn’t give her last name because he wasn’t sure what he could have given as his. Kline? He was mostly sure Kline was his mother’s last name, but being born with knowledge was tricky. The knowings were soft impressions at best and blurred with disuse, or shattered as he replaced them with more vivid experiences.

“Where were you going?” she asked.

“As far as you’ll take me.”

For the first time since Jack had met her, Claire offered him a smile, tired and jagged as it was. “Yeah, been there, too, man.”

As the engine hummed its peculiar lullaby, Jack closed his eyes and felt not a sun next to him, but a candle flame. _Safety._ The word persisted in his head. Safety, like someone else had been. Someone whose name started with a C like Claire’s, but wasn’t here anymore, because Jack had not been safe when he’d been born. The thought eventually slipped into the open road behind him. He couldn’t dwell on the past. He had a future to assure.

+++

Claire had interesting hobbies. Even after they parted ways, Jack kept an eye on her, waiting for the moment he understood what made her special. Instead, he was met with her walking through the woods late at night with a flashlight and a large gun, chanting, “Here, vengeful woodland spirit. Here, boy.” Her footsteps were loud and her tone patronizing—Jack couldn’t say which one of those prompted the forest sprite to attack her, but if he had to guess, it would be the latter.

Unfortunately, the forest sprite had friends.

Claire had taken half of them down with what turned out to be not a _gun_ so much as it was a _flamethrower_. She was holding her own. Until something bigger emerged. A huge, lithe creature dripping with moss, like a monster straight out of a 70s horror flick. It stepped from its place hidden against a tree—very good camouflage, Jack commended—and whipped Claire’s gun out of her hand. Before Jack could think about it, he felt the cool metal of a knife slide into his hand, pulled from the ether. He struck the creature down with it. The sprites fled as soon as their guardian hit the ground, no more than rats scurrying off a ship en masse.

Claire stared at him in shock for a solid second before recollecting herself. “ _You’re_ a _hunter_?”

Jack couldn’t say _yes,_ but he also couldn’t say _no,_ so he replied instead, “You sound surprised.”

“Well, yeah.” She gestured to the area around them. “I didn’t expect to see anyone else on this case. Besides, no offense, but when I met you, I took you as more James Dean than Rambo.”

“I can’t be both?” Questions, Jack decided, were good. If he kept asking questions, he never had to give any answers. Besides, he had no idea who either of those people were.

“I guess you wouldn’t be the first.” Her expression relayed that she was thinking of someone specifically and fondly. With a shake of her head, she went to go retrieve her flamethrower. “But I’ve never heard of you before.”

“I’m new.” Eight days old, to be exact. “I don’t think I’ve met another hunter.” Except for possibly the tall one in flannel. There had been another flannel-person outside, too, and now that Jack was paying attention, Claire was also wearing flannel. It could be some sort of uniform. Is that why she said he didn’t seem like a hunter? He didn’t have the right camouflage? Clothes were trickier than he could have imagined. “Are there a lot of you?”

“Not really.” She began leading them back to the road. “It’s a dangerous job. People die. Good people.” Jack felt her candle-flame grace shudder and heard her voice tighten. “Are you sure you’re ready for that?”

“I’m not sure I have much of a choice.”

+++

“So let me get this straight,” said Claire two days later, “you have no phone, no car, no credit cards, and no ID.”

“Correct.”

“You know that’s suspicious as hell, right? I mean total off-the-grid, fugitive stuff.”

“Your car is stolen, your credit cards don’t go through, and three of your IDs are fake,” he pointed out.

“But I _have_ them,” she said. “How were you even getting by?”

“Scavenging, mostly.”

“Yeah, well, you’re not going to get by in the hunter life by _scavenging_.” She rolled her eyes. “You any good at pool?”

+++

Claire helped him set up an identity as Jack Kline. They did a lot of things he knew weren’t strictly speaking _good_ , but they did those to get rid of beings that were worse, so Claire said it balanced out in the end. She went her own way for a few weeks, then ran into Jack again later when they had _coincidentally_ found the same case. Jack, at that point, was getting better at understanding how to fade into the crowd.

He had reservations about killing monsters at first. Some were too much like him for comfort, just scared or hungry. It took him about a week to realize that everyone was hungry. Humans ate cows and pigs because they were hungry. Wendigos ate humans because they were hungry. Hunger, while natural, could so easily provide the seed of conflict.

When he found Claire again, he told her about his revelation over cartons of Chinese food, and her features became heavy. “Yeah,” she said, “but it’s us or them.”

Jack understood. One needed there to be exclusively an “us” in order to bring about a universal peace. Yet that would mean getting rid of all of the “them.” Was that why the angels thought he was evil? Because they thought he saw the host as a “them,” despite being half angel?

He didn’t like this. It was too complicated.

“Sometimes,” Jack admitted to her out loud, “it’s hard to tell if something is an _us_ or a _them_.”

“The way I see it,” responded Claire, “if it tries to kill someone, it’s a _them._ If it doesn’t, then fine—fish are friends, not food, and all that.”

He was puzzled. “What do fish have to do with this?”

“C’mon, _Finding Nemo_?” Claire prodded. “The movie?”

“I haven’t seen many movies.”

“You’re hopeless,” she declared, throwing a hand haphazardly into the air. The motion made her thick blonde curls dance and her blue eyes glint against the parking lot lights outside the window. “What I meant was, not all the monsters out there are bad. A friend of a friend is a werewolf who only eats animal hearts. It’s what you do that makes you a monster.”

She said it so casually, without gravity, as if she was dropping feathers rather than anvils. “But then,” he argued, “to someone else, we’re a _them_.”

Claire stopped slurping noodles for a second to stare at him pensively. “Yeah, Jack. That’s how it goes.”

He swirled around his food for a little while, debating if now was the right time to ask her the question he’d been mulling over since they met. It was what kept drawing him back to her after all. He would have to be careful about it. “Claire, have you ever met an angel?”

She went dead still. “Why?”

It was as good as a _yes_ , but confirmed that Jack would have to be tactful. “It’s a prerequisite to the conversation I was about to start.”

“Oh.” Her eyes went from him to her food and stuck there. She remained tense, though tried to pretend she wasn’t bothered. Claire wouldn’t have made it in Hollywood. She was a substandard actor. “Yeah. I’ve met angels. Have you?”

“Yes, but she wasn’t very nice.”

Claire scoffed. “Most angels are total dicks. There was one that was okay, but even he was a dick the first time we met. He’s…” She swallowed hard. “He’s dead now, though.”

“You sound sad.” The last time Jack recalled feeling sad, he’d been glancing one many weep over the body of another, the scent of charred grace tainting the air.

“It was complicated,” Claire said. “ _He_ was complicated.” She put her food down with a mighty sigh. “It’s just…he ruined my life. He’s the reason my parents are dead. I know he felt bad about it later, and he tried to make it up to me, he tried to play dad, but he couldn’t, and I felt like I could be as mad as I wanted for as long as I wanted, and now that he’s gone, I guess I just wish I spent less time being mad.”

That was far more emotion than Jack had been prepared for. All he’d wanted was to figure out why Claire felt so familiar. He didn’t know how to react. What was it humans said? “I’m sorry.” That was it. Humans apologized for everything bad in the world like it was somehow their fault. Maybe it was. He hadn’t decided yet. “What was his name?”

“Castiel.”

That. That was familiar. It made him think of sputtering grace and desperation and hope and _safe_ and a tan trench coat lying limp with wings seared into the ground around it and the _sad_ from earlier. Castiel. Was that the name of his would-be protector? Was he why Claire felt _safe_?

+++

It all went wrong with one hunt. They’d gone on it together because, along the way, Jack saw Claire and thought _protect._ She was the closest thing he had to kin that wasn’t trying to kill him. They were even mistaken for siblings twice, with their blonde hair and blue eyes, and Jack supposed they were in a way, though not biologically. When he saw a werewolf edge too close, he didn’t think. He leapt. It caught him instead and clawed his front open, ripped his skin to ribbons. And then his skin grew back. Torn and regrown. Over and over, until his grace had had enough of this nonsense and flared outward. It flayed the werewolf alive, little more than the smell of smoke and dying embers in the wake of its death.

Behind him, Claire gasped for air. “What the hell?!” she shouted. Panic. Jack knew that emotion was panic. “What was _that_?!”

“I—”

“You’re an _angel?!_ ”

“No, I—” _I what?_ What explanation could Jack possibly give her that would make her look less betrayed? “I’m…half…angel.”

“You’re the nephilim.”

And if that didn’t sound like a criminal accusation, Jack didn’t know what would. He groaned and flopped to on the ground, cross-legged, in the hopes of appearing less threatening. “I wish people would stop saying that like…like _that._ ”

“You’re the son of Lucifer. The Devil.”

“And of a woman who felt so much love that she was willing to die so I could live.” It came out more harshly than Jack wanted it to—a hiss like the serpents his father was famous for consorting with. His throat was sore. His eyes burned. A werewolf couldn’t hurt him, but the knowledge of what his mother did for him rent him to pieces.

“Sam and Dean said you brainwashed her and Castiel.”

“Wouldn’t you have?” He tugged on unruly chunks of blonde hair until his scalp burned. Perhaps it was time to fly away and never look back. It would have been easier. “If someone was trying to kill you, for no reason you understood, wouldn’t you have told them that they didn’t need to? That you didn’t want to hurt anyone? It’s not like I had many options. I couldn’t _talk._ I wasn’t even born yet.”

The hostility of Claire’s demeanor lessened, though she kept her guard up. “Why did you find me?”

He didn’t even try to deny that their meeting had held a purpose. “I was trying to find other nephilim. There weren’t any, but you had residual grace, and it felt familiar. Safe.”

“Castiel.” Claire’s hands clenched into fists at the name; at the remembered face with its odd expressions and the voice that was too low and everything that must have run through her head. “He possessed me once. A long time ago.”

“That makes sense then.”

“He died trying to protect you.”

The grit in her voice shoved all the _sad_ into biting vividness _._ This girl, kicking at the tires of her car as she struggled not to cry on an empty stretch of desert road. That man, bent over a figure on the ground who wouldn’t move again no matter how much he begged. He didn’t understand earlier why humans apologized for events that weren’t directly their faults. He realized now it wasn’t about _fault_ —it was about shouldering the collective burden of a tragedy no one had the power to stop. Jack felt that weight heavy on his shoulders. He supposed that made him human.

“Claire, what do you want from me?” he asked, voice rasping with raw honesty. “I could tell you I’m sorry, that I couldn’t do anything, that I didn’t want anyone to get hurt, but I know that won’t make it better. And I want _better_. I want to make everything better so that no one has to suffer anymore, but I don’t know how to do that, because all anyone ever sees when they look at me is _evil._ They see a _them_ instead of an _us._ Can you imagine what it’s like for everyone to hate you on principle?”

The atmosphere clenched around them, charged, the way it was before a storm. _I am the lightening,_ Jack had thought months ago, at the very beginning of his life. He was the lightning and he didn’t know what he’d do if Claire didn’t ground him in the next three minutes. Futures opened up inside his head; paths and possibilities and prophesies. And power. So much power, his skin seared with it, and he closed his eyes because he was afraid they might start glowing.

“…Okay.”

The word drew him in like a lightning rod. The white hot heat scorching his insides began to settle. He breathed. “Okay?” Okay what?

“Okay, I’ll give you a chance,” she clarified. “I mean, you did save my life. A few times, actually, so it’d be kind of bitchy if I didn’t at least hear you out.”

The acceptance was euphoric. He could have hugged her if he wasn’t sure she likely would have stabbed him. “Thank you.”

“Yeah, fine, just don’t go all googly-eyed on me,” she said. “Hunters don’t do googly-eyes. You got that?”

“Just black eyes and stink eyes?”

“I can’t tell if you’re being snarky or sincere.”

“Honestly? Neither can I half the time.”

After all, the best jokes were so often true. His later life experiences would come to prove that. He’d later learn that not all jokes were funny.

+++

Sam and Dean Winchester were at the motel door. Sam and Dean Winchester were at the motel door and _nothing was okay._ Jack backed away. He was sure if he was anything less than a nephilim, he would have tripped over his own two feet at the shock. His internal organs all felt like they’d all been flipped upside down. Was this emotion betrayal? he wondered as he gawked at a still-faced Claire. There was hardly enough air in his lungs to whisper “You told them where I was?”

“I didn’t!” Claire insisted. Her arms spread wide, as if letting him search her for weapons.

“No, she didn’t,” Dean agreed. It was clear he didn’t think this was a good thing. “We saw you two on security camera footage while investigating a ghoul case—the one you _apparently_ took care of.”

“What can I say?” Claire asked, shifting so as to come between Jack and the Winchesters, “Having a nephilim on your side really helps hunts go smoothly.”

Sam held up his hands in peace. “Whoa, look, okay, we’re not here to hurt anyone.” He’d taken Claire’s defensive stance as a sign they needed to up the Defcon level. All Jack could see was the same alarm as the first time they’d met—instinct telling them both the other was dangerous. Not being here with the intention to hurt didn’t mean they _couldn’t._ Sam tried again. “We just want to talk.”

Jack seethed, “You have two angel blades in your waistbands that suggest otherwise.” He didn’t know if they’d work on him, but he didn’t want to take the chance.

Dean didn’t take favorably to that reaction. “Claire,” he called, waving her closer, “come over here.”

“No.” She stood her ground. “Jack’s my friend. Yeah, he’s dangerous. So are we. Castiel _died_ saving him from Lucifer. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“Of course it does!” Dean roared. The pain of loss sank into every line in his face, some of them new since the last time Claire had seen him. “But Cas wasn’t himself.”

The distrust was cloying. Jack could have choked on it. In that moment, he experienced hate for the first time. Hate was a fire. Hate threatened to eat away at him until there was no _Jack_ left. He didn’t feel hate for the Winchesters, though. No. Jack hated his father. If Jack had been anyone else’s child, he was convinced he would have stood a chance.

As it stood, all the paths and all the possibilities he’d seen narrowed down to one.

Jack ran.

+++

Here is the present, as it plays out, with no certainty, no foreshadowing or hindsight, no victor to write history as they see fit.

In three months, Castiel shows up at the bunker door, scratch-free and grace intact, unaware that he’d been dead. Dean throws insults while squeezing the life out of him, saying, “I thought this was the last time, man. I really thought you wouldn’t come back again.” Sam agrees quietly. The gravity of it hits Castiel, and he worries that he’s been brought back as merely another game piece. Castiel looks for Jack, but if he finds him, he does not admit to it. Dean and Sam are equally suspicious for a while before accepting that this is _their_ Cas in all his free-willed, dorky glory. They call Claire once it’s safe, and she drives over without hesitation. It’s time to bury the hatchet—or angel blade in this case.

In six months, the gates to Heaven and Hell slide shut to anyone who is not a Reaper. No one can explain this with evidence, though they all have their suspicions. Castiel looks to the sky forlornly, though he says, “I’d rather be on this side. With my family.”

In eight months, the Winchesters and company hear rumors of a mystery hunter who works so efficiently that other hunters only ever catch his shadow as he leaves.

It’s a year before Claire sees Jack again. She’s in a café, typing furiously on her laptop, when a familiar hand settles down two cups of coffee. Jack smirks the Devil’s smirk. “Hey, stranger,” he says.

“Hey,” she greets in return, astonished. Partly because he is here. Partly because he’s wearing a _John Doe’s Joe_ apron, complete with cartoon logo. It jars her out of her speechlessness. “You’re working as a barista?”

“I hear I make a sinful latte,” he jokes. His Devil’s smirk softens. “It helps me stay grounded, though. It’s easier to feel like part of humanity when I’m making drinks for people thirty hours a week. I mean, there have been times murder seemed like a good option, but I’m told everyone else here shares the opinion. So. More human, less Satan.”

“And when you’re not making coffee?”

“Oh, sister, the rest of the week is _party time_.” He grins and leans back. “I can’t wait to tell you about all the very interesting people I’ve met. Example: Did you know that God goes by Chuck? Or that he has a sister? Because let me say, that was a little weird.”

It’s a nice conversation and Claire thinks there’s at least a 75% chance that Jack isn’t going to bring on the apocalypse. Although she does have to talk him out of making kale extinct. Not that she likes kale, but it’s a little brash to eradicate it just because he thinks it’s inferior to spinach and turns people into snobs who say things like “I have a _kale_ smoothie every morning and it’s so much more energizing than all those sugared cereals _most people_ eat.”

Then again, she could be wrong, and the extinction of kale could just be Stage 1 of Jack’s master plan.

It’s entirely possible.

 


End file.
